Parking Wars – A comment on the UIndy parking problem
Its was 11:30 p.m. when my friends and I had decided to take a food run to Taco Bell, thinking it would only take 10 or 15 minutes at the most. There wasn’t a line in drive-through, and traffic was non-existent; we got our food in record time. When we returned to campus, we didn’t expect to find all of the parking spots full.
What went from a 10-minute food-run turned into 15 minutes as we circled the back parking lots of East, New, Central and Cory Bretz Halls just hoping we would find a place to park. The Cravens/Warren parking lot was out of the question – crossing Hanna Avenue that late at night is dangerous in this neighborhood.
Thirty minutes had passed, and finally we eyed a spot and raced toward it. It was near our dorm, which meant that we wouldn’t have to trek across campus in the cold weather in the middle of the night.
The residents of UIndy are struggling to find parking here on campus, but why? The answer: we don’t have enough parking spots on campus to suffice the residents who live here.
According to the UIndy campus police, there are 2,051 total parking slots on campus for students; 1,334 of those are reserved for commuters and 1,532 are for residents. (This doesn’t include the gravel parking lot off Shelby St. that students tend to use.)
According to the Fall 2009 Enrollment numbers, UIndy has a total of 4,977 students that attend classes here. This means that even if the university were to double the parking spaces on campus, it still wouldn’t suffice for the amount of student’s that attend UIndy.
Wasn’t the parking issue supposed to be resolved or nearly resolved when East Hall was built?
Even before East Hall was built, there weren’t enough parking spots on the north side of campus to hold the residents that lived in Cory Bretz, New and Central Halls and only 152 new spots were added with the construction of East Hall.
Last year alone, when parking wouldn’t suffice for residents that lived in those dorms had to park diagonally across from Cory Bretz in lot number five, and sometimes go as far as the library. Now, lot number five isn’t even available to residents – it’s been given to commuters.
Additionally, people who do not live in the dorms are parking in the resident’s spots. I’ve witnessed it myself. Some students who move off-campus do not change their stickers from ‘resident’ to ‘commuter’ and still use the dorm parking lots.
So, what can they do about it?
First, UIndy needs to get its act together and start doing it like the professionals. Today there are different ways of categorizing parking areas electronically with scanners and simple computer input systems.
Even a simple excel document that states a student’s name, parking permit number, resident hall and car-model will do. There’s an even simpler solution to resident parking – especially with the overflow of residents on campus.
In East Hall you pay approximate $740 more, a semester, than you would to live in Cory Bretz, New, Cravens or Warren Halls to have your own room, bathroom and some privacy. Shouldn’t it be the same way with parking? Permits for students, as of right now, are color coded for ‘resident’ and ‘commuter’ – resident being red and commuter being yellow. Couldn’t they, in a way, make the color system more complex by assigning different colors to different dorms?
Then, those who don’t live in East Hall can’t park in East Hall’s parking lot and the same would go for every dorm. Then you wouldn’t have people who live in Cory Bretz – who live on the west side of the north dorms parking in the lot behind East Hall and vice-versa.
Call me crazy, but giving everyone a more specific color for where they live seems like a more organized system. The East Hall parking lot was positioned behind East Hall, therefore, shouldn’t it be designated as East Hall resident parking only? Just like the U-shaped parking for Cory Bretz – it’s directly behind its building therefore; shouldn’t that be parking only reserved for those residents?
I know that some of these solutions might not suffice for everyone, but something must be done.
Right now, students have to find other places to park besides on campus because of these issues. Pretty soon, there will be another ‘record enrollment’ year, and students will have to park even farther away.
These solutions may be more time consuming and cost a little extra for the university to invest in, but if they did, it could help students in the long run.
After all, if we are paying $21,000 to attend classes here, shouldn’t we get the reward of actually having a place to park on campus?
